Yin started working for the Zeek delivery platform as a “fixed-route” rider in early 2021. For several months he had to wait for his salary, and in December 2022 the company shut down altogether.
Demand for delivery services soared during the peak months of the Covid-19 pandemic, and riders like Yin could count on earning up to HK$200 per order, he said. For him, that meant working 20-hour days to make HK$60,000 to HK$70,000 a month.
He was owed some HK$80,000 for the period from August to mid-December of 2022, equivalent to about four months of his usual income. But he has not been able to claim a cent, either from his former boss or from a government fund.
“I just want my money back,” Yin, who is in his early thirties, told a press conference in early January called by the Riders’ Rights Concern Group, part of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, a non-governmental pressure group focusing on labour issues.
‘A complete blur’
Last year, Hong Kong’s labour tribunal ruled that six Zeek delivery workers had employee status, making them eligible for labour protections under the law and able to claim ex gratia payments from a wage protection fund.
As of December 19, the Labour Department had received more than 300 claims for wage arrears related to Zeek, according to a Labour and Welfare Bureau document submitted to the Legislative Council (LegCo).
In an emailed response to HKFP on Thursday, the Labour Department said it had made payments from the fund to 278 qualified applicants formerly employed by Zeek. The statement did not provide a breakdown of how many of those applicants were frontline delivery workers.
The concern group has followed up on 12 cases, of which six – including Yin’s – have been deemed ineligible.
Caps on Protection of Wages on Insolvency Fund claims – click to view
- Payment for wage arrears: HK$80,000
- Claims for wages in lieu of notice: HK$45,000
- Pay for annual leave and untaken statutory holidays: HK$26,000
Yin filed his claim on June 28, 2023. It was denied, with the Labour Department determining it came more than six months after Yin’s last day of service.
The date when delivery platform workers stop providing services is a point of ambiguity, said the concern group’s Mak Tak-ching, resulting in cases like Yin’s.
“The law is a complete blur,” said Yin, speaking Cantonese. “I hope the Labour Department, or the government, can clarify what it means by six months. I’m still online [on the app] and I haven’t received any notice that I’ve been laid off.” According to the Labour Department’s reply to HKFP, Zeek has yet to be officially wound up.
“[The government] needs to control the rich, not the poor,” said Yue, another delivery worker who was denied a payout of HK$8,000 from the government fund, in Mandarin. The 50-year-old, whose claim was also turned down because of the time limit, added that he considered it an expensive lesson.
Specific protections
Workers in Hong Kong are categorised either as employed or self-employed, according to the Labour Ordinance. “[Lawmakers] aren’t urging the government to establish new laws for the platform economy, which is a huge flaw,” Mak said.
As platform workers are considered self-employed under current legislation, they do not generally enjoy benefits such as wage protection, paid leave, or compensation for work injuries. The concern group describes them as “between employment and self-employment.”
Mak added that the authorities should legislate specific labour protections for delivery platform workers, given their particular circumstances, rather than try to classify them as either employees or as self-employed.
In a Chinese-language statement given to reporters at the press conference, the concern group called on the government to formulate a policy direction for platform workers, and urged it not to deny workers employment status without sufficient grounds. It also called for new, separate legislation or policies to provide full protections for platform workers.
The Riders’ Rights Concern Group’s policy recommendations – click to view
- Platform workers must be entitled to paid leave and rest days, must not be overworked, and must have reasonable rest times, including sick leave.
- In the event that a platform worker is injured at work, the company is obliged to provide compensation comparable to the level of protection provided under the Employees’ Compensation Ordinance.
- Platform labourers are protected under the Occupational Safety and Health Ordinance, and platform companies are legally responsible for ensuring their safety and health at work.
“Platform workers appear to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and freedom, but that so-called ‘autonomy and freedom’ only exists in two forms: start working, and allow yourself to be controlled, or don’t, and sit idly by,” the concern group said.
Yin and Yue spoke to reporters less than a month after a LegCo meeting on labour protections for digital platform workers, where the Labour and Welfare Bureau told lawmakers that granting delivery workers employee status across the board “may not be conducive to the development of the industry.”
In a December LegCo brief, the bureau said that considering all platform workers as employees “may also hinder the job autonomy and flexibility currently enjoyed by [platform workers] or even adversely affect [their] income.” Some lawmakers recommended instead that delivery platform companies be forced to take out work-related insurance for employees.
The department has also set up a liaison group comprised of its own representatives and major delivery platforms, according to its document. At the press conference, Mak suggested that the group discuss platforms’ algorithms and invite riders to be involved in the deliberations.
Minimal intervention
“The government is taking a minimally interventionist approach,” Au-Yeung Tat-chor, assistant professor of sociology and social policy at Lingnan University, told HKFP by phone in Cantonese on Wednesday.
The authorities lacked comprehensive policies on labour disputes in the platform economy, which were instead referred to the city’s courts to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, he said.
Platform Work Directive’s five indicators of employee relationship – click to view
- upper limits on the amount of money workers can receive
- supervision of their performance, including by electronic means
- control over the distribution or allocation of tasks
- control over working conditions and restrictions on choosing working hours
- restrictions on their freedom to organise their work and rules on their appearance or conduct
Overseas, some progress has been made to protect the rights of gig economy workers. Under a provisional agreement between the European Union’s council and parliament, workers would be legally presumed to be employees of a digital platform if their relationship with the platform fulfils at least two out of five predetermined indicators.
In the same vein, a core consideration of last year’s Zeek ruling, which referenced a landmark 2007 case at the city’s top court on false unemployment, was the degree of control exerted by the employer – for instance, in the form of control over wages and penalties for failing to meet the company’s standards.
According to the concern group, the degree of control exerted over workers at other platform companies, such as Deliveroo and Foodpanda was even higher than at Zeek.
The EU indicators are expected to be adopted at a governmental level, rather than just in the court system, as in Hong Kong’s case, noted Justine Lam, a programme officer at the concern group.
“The 11 indicators [in the 2007 case] were set more than a decade ago — they weren’t made for the current digital age, whereas the EU looks at… how your pay is calculated, whether the system monitors your performance, and how work is assigned,” she said in Cantonese at the press conference.
While the Zeek ruling could feasibly be applied to most other delivery workers in court, Mak said, the main priority was for the government to affirm platform workers’ rights through policy.
Though some jurisdictions are looking into reclassifying platform workers as employees, the more commonly adopted policy direction is “semi-protection” – whereby specific protections are made available without granting employee status.
Authorities could strike a balance by legislating protections for platform workers as “dependent self-employed workers” said Au-Yeung.
That would mean legislating enhanced protections for those whose work is largely controlled by platform companies, he added, saying that granting employee status across the board may present a “regulatory dilemma.” It would, he said, require delivery platform companies to pay for extra benefits and massively increase their labour costs.
The Labour Department has commissioned the Census and Statistics Department to conduct a survey on the working conditions of platform workers. It is expected to start late this year, with results released in late 2024 to early 2025.
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